Landscape Architecture and Environmental Sustainability

Creating Positive Change Through Design

Joshua Zeunert

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781350033825
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Winner of the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects (AILA) National Excellence Award (Research and Communication) 2017
Winner of the AILA VIC Excellence Award (Research and Communication) 2017
Highly Commended (Communication and Presentation) Landscape Institute Awards 2018 Landscape architecture has a pivotal role in ensuring environmental sustainability through design interventions. This book takes a broad look at strategies and completed projects to provide the reader with a strong understanding of the sustainability challenges being faced by designers today, and potential routes to addressing them. The book covers essential concepts of landscape architecture and environmental sustainability, including: - Ecology, multifunctional landscapes and sensitive intervention
- Remediation, cleansing and environmental infrastructure
- Social sustainability, design activism and healthy landscapes
- Food systems, productive landscapes and transportation
- Performance ratings, materials and life cycles Through case studies from around the world and interviews with leading landscape architects and practitioners, this book invites discussion about possible future scenarios, relevant theories and project responses in landscape environmental design. With hundreds of color images throughout the book, and additional study material in the companion website, Joshua Zeunert provides an overview of the multidimensional qualities of landscape sustainability.

1
AN INTRODUCTION

1.1a
Buried machinery, Dallas, South Dakota, 1936

It is crucial to grasp the underlying factors affecting sustainability in order to conceive effective design solutions. This chapter briefly introduces some of the deep-seated practices and actions that have adversely impacted the environment (with a particular focus on industrialization), as well as the responses to this problematic phenomenon.

1.1a
1.1b
North Great Plains Shelterbelt (Toronto, Canada to Abilene, Texas), 1934
Early 20th-century agricultural practices like native vegetation clearance led to crippling frequent dust storms in the USA’s Great Plains. This harsh, semi-arid environment became known as the ‘Dust Bowl’. President Franklin Roosevelt and the US Forest Service coordinated a 100 mile (160km) wide ‘shelterbelt zone’ from Toronto in Canada to the Brazos River, Texas. Despite the substantial challenges and complexities of this continental-scale project (such as high capital cost and multiple jurisdictions), the Civilian Conservation Corps, aided by paid farmers, began planting 220 million trees in 1934. These shelterbelts would reduce the harmful effects of prevailing dry winds, protect fields and livestock; reduce evaporation through holding water and snow in the soil; reduce soil erosion by holding soil in place; and ultimately, eliminate large dust storms. Even today, the project perhaps represents the largest and most focused effort of the US government to address an environmental problem. Image 1.1b shows part of the planned shelterbelt zone.

“Anthropocene is an apt and provocative term with which to describe the age and the world in which we now live. Thanks to this concept we can better place many observations about human influence on natural processes. Around the world there are more trees in parks, nurseries and other human settings than in the primeval forest. Humans are capable, in 500 years, of burning up the biomass produced in 500 million years, and of altering the climate with the greenhouse gases released. A single project for tar sand extraction requires as much soil displacement as the sediment carried off by all the rivers in the world … The advance of humanity is coupled with an avalanche of species facing extinction.”

DIRK SIJMONS, WAKING UP IN THE ANTHROPOCENE (2014)

“Could the stability achieved over aeons of geological time be destroyed within a few generations, with no guarantee that any new balance would offer our descendants an ecological niche?”

DAVID REID, SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT (1995)

A BRIEF ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY

Before civilization

Prior to settlements and civilization, largely nomadic human populations were attuned to and constrained by seasonal rhythms and flows, yet still incrementally altered and reshaped the natural composition of environments (such as through the use of fire and targeting specific plants and animals for food). Low global human population reduced the extent of anthropogenic (human-generated) environmental impacts and roaming populations were more conducive to ecological recovery.

1.2
Geologic Time
Since Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer coined the term ‘Anthropocene’ in 2000 to reflect the evidence of substantial impact of humanity upon the Earth’s systems, ‘official’ recognition of this new era to replace the existing ‘Holocene’ on the geological time scale (shown here) has gained significant momentum.

1.3
Hunting and Gathering (200000 BCE to present)

200,000 years ago

Anatomically modern humans evolved from archaic Homo sapiens in the Middle Paleolithic

Homo habilis appeared in Africa about 2.8 million years ago.
Homo erectus appeared around 2 million years ago and expanded their populations through Europe and Asia 1 million years ago.

100,000 years ago to the present day

‘Pando’ Populus tremuloides tree (Quaking Aspen) clonal colony estimated 80,000 years old, USA

Homo sapiens extended its population from Africa & Middle East to Asia & Australia (Australian Aborigines the oldest living culture today) 50–60,000 years ago

Homo sapiens extended its population to Europe 40–50,000 years ago

Humans gathered & consumed wild cereal grains 21000 BCE
Homo sapiens extended its population to Americas 1st Agricultural (Neolithic) Revolution c. 10000 BCE Beginnings of ‘civilization’

1.4
Civilization (10000 BCE to present)

10000 BCE - 8000 BCE

Population at 10000 BCE: ~2.5 million

1st Agricultural (Neolithic) Revolution c. 10,000 BCE

Australian Aborigines depict warfare in stone paintings, c. 10,000 BCE

Beginnings of ‘civilization’

Religious site at Göbekli Tepe, Turkey c.9130 BCE

Çatalhöyük, Turkey, c.2600 BCE

8000 BCE - 5000 BCE

Population at 8000 BCE: ~5 million

End of last Ice Age, 8000 BCE

Early urban settlement Çatalhöyük, Turkey c. 7500 BCE

Flooding of North Sea basin c. 7500 BCE

Pengtoushan and Peiligang culture cultures, China, c. 7500–7000 BCE

Norte Chico civilization, Peru, c. 7000 BCE

Holocene Climate Optimum, c. 6000 BCE

5000 BCE - 0 CE

Population at 5000 BCE: ~10 million

Invention of the wheel, Mesopotamia, 3500 BCE

Invention of writing, Mesopotamia, 3200 BCE

Great Basin Bristlecone Pine (oldest known non-clonal organism), 3051 BCE

Stonehenge begins, UK, c. 3000 BCE

Settlement at Skara Brae, Orkney Islands, Scotland c. 3000 BCE

The Pyramids at Giza begin, c. 2600 BCE

Flush toilets, Indus Valley cities Harappa & Mohenjo-daro, c. 2500 BCE

The Ziggurat at Ur, Sumer, Mesopotamia c. 2250 BCE

Atra-Hasis Epic gives warnings of human overpopulation, 1900 BCE

0 CE - 1000 CE

Population at 0 CE: ~200 million

Persepolis, Persia founded c. 540 BCE

Sri Lanka – first country in the world to have a nature reserve, 200 BCE

The Fall of Mauryan Empire 185 BCE

The Fall of Han Dynasty 189–220 CE

The Fall of the Roman Empire 117, 284, 376 & 476 CE

The Fall of the Gupta Empire 550 CE

Dust veil event from volcanic eruption, 536–551 CE

1000 CE - present day

Population at 1000 CE: ~275 million

Population at present day: 7 billion+

Aztec Chinampas Agriculture, 1150–1350 CE

Onset of Little Ice Age, 1300 CE

Bubonic (black) plague decimates European population, 1347–1350s

Columbian Biological Exchange 1492 CE

André Le Nôtre 1613–1700

Pamphlet on Air Pollution, John Evelyn, London, 1661 CE

Seed Drill, Jethro Tull, 1701

1.5
Easter Island
Easter Island was once home to a range of plant and animal species including 21 tree species. By European arrival in 1722, the island’s Polynesian population had dropped from its peak of 15,000 to 2,000–3,000 due to environmental mismanagement and mass tree clearing. Jared Diamond terms this process “ecocide” and the “clearest example of a society that destroyed itself by overexploiting its own resources.”

Sedentary civilization

The development of agriculture around 10000 BCE (Before the Common/Christian Era) facilitated establishment of permanent settlements. Such communities (hamlets, villages, towns, cities) created cumulative degradative impacts, heightening environmental pressur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1 An Introduction
• Chapter 2 Landscape and Ecology
• Chapter 3 Landscape as Cleanser
• Chapter 4 Environmental Infrastructure
• Chapter 5 Landscape and Food
• Chapter 6 Landscape Activism, Art and Beauties
• Chapter 7 Social Sustainability: Influence Beyond Site
• Chapter 8 Less is More: A Lighter Touch
• Chapter 9 Landscape and Performance
• Chapter 10 Scenarios, Challenges and Reframing Land(scape)
• Glossary
• Resources
• Acknowledgments
• Image Credits
• eCopyright